News

Scant, uneven efforts by U.S. state authorities to identify the individuals who own or control companies formed within their jurisdictions hobble federal efforts to investigate and prosecute money launderers, an intergovernmental group recently concluded. In its first assessment of the United States in more than 10 years, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force said that U.S. officials mostly rely on a "range of investigatory powers" to obtain beneficial ownership information on the "vast majority" of the estimated 13 million active legal entities operating in the country. But state governments generally don't collect accurate, sufficient and timely data on beneficial owners,...